Home › Weblog › Free Speech

Ban 'Offensive and Menacing Behaviour', Alston Argues

6 September 2003

Australia's most vociferious luddite has proposed to ban the use of the internet for offensive and menacing behaviour, with offenders to face up to two-years in prison, according to a press release issued by the Department of Communications, yesterday.

People using the Internet to advocate or facilitate violent protests, for example by spreading information on methods of violently disrupting international meetings and attacking police officers protecting such gatherings, including those using the Internet to harass or menace others are amongst those who could be prosecuted under the new offences.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet content hosts will be exempted from the new offence where they do not have knowledge of the content of the material that they transmit or host.

The minister's press release seems (like so many others) to rely for its justification of the censorship law on everybody's preferred scapegoat of the modern era: child pornography. It has been used as a justification for all kinds of curtailments of civil liberties, from freedom of speech to privacy rights. When will authorities learn that it is impossible to effectively restrict content from being uploaded onto a website? Convictions are more likely to be made by (lawfully) pursuing those individuals who access the material.

Microsoft has established a dedicated Linux research facility from which to monitor the progress of the biggest threat to its share of the server OS market. Evidently 5 years of brushing aside its furry-fethered bretheren as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" (source) has made them overly complacent in dealing with competitors whom they can't buy out.

Directions Magazine has published an interesting article about the progress of local area network bandwidth over the past two decades. LAN speed appears to increase by an order of magnitude every 5 years or so, and looks set to shortly outpace the speed of client storage devices. The day my network card can receive files quicker than my hard drive can store them will be a happy one indeed.

Finally, AMD has updated their Duron/Morgan line of budget-oriented CPUs, with new models ranging from 1.4Ghz to 1.8Ghz. This reviewer manages to overclock their processor to 2.3Ghz with stock cooling, suggesting that AMD has a fair bit of headroom in their production process. However, yields for their flagship Athlon64 line remain dismally low, with sources suggesting that the company may have considerable difficulty meeting demand for shipments when the CPU is released come 23 September.